David Hare has made the headlines with a damning attack on “director’s theatre”. I have some sympathy with Hare’s argument. But I have a rather different, more urgent anxiety. It is not so much that classic drama is being hijacked by concept-crazed directors: it is that, with the exception of Shakespeare, it is gradually disappearing from the national repertory altogether.

You could make that the National Theatre repertory. Artistic director Rufus Norris has just announced plans for the next year and they make surprising reading. In many ways, the main news is cheering: 12 new plays, half of them by women. I look eagerly forward to new work by, among many others, Annie Baker, Lucy Kirkwood, Yaël Farber and Nina Raine. But what is staggering is the virtual disappearance of what you might call the classic repertory. Between the new production of Twelfth Night this February and Rufus Norris’s projected Macbeth in the spring of 2018, the only work that acknowledges the past (aside from short runs of Shakespeare for younger audiences in the Dorfman) is a revival of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1991-2) and Stephen Sondheim’s Follies (1971). This strikes me as a staggering dereliction of the National’s duty.

Every director redefines the National according to his – so far, never her – tastes. But it is always assumed that it is part of the contract to strike a balance between the old and the new. Look back 10 years to 2007 and you find the National offering an astute blend of the two: Euripides, Shakespeare, Etherege, Gorky, O’Neill, Brecht, Shaw, Beckett and Pinter were combined with new work from Joe Penhall, Kwame-Kwei Armah, Ayub Khan Din, Nicholas Wright and Matt Charman as well as War Horse and Kneehigh’s A Matter of Life and Death. Go back 20 years to 1997 and the story is similar: Shakespeare, Ibsen, Brecht, Wesker, Pinter and Peter Weiss co-existed with premieres from Tom Stoppard, David Hare, Martin McDonagh, Patrick Marber and Peter Gill.

Rufus Norris backstage at the National Theatre in 2015. He will direct Macbeth in spring 2018. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

This is about right. From its inception, the National has combined the roles of providing a library of world drama and acting as a stimulus to living playwrights: a policy actively promoted by Peter Hall, Richard Eyre, Trevor Nunn and Nicholas Hytner.

Rufus Norris has made clear that he wants the National to more visibly represent the nation at large: if that means more work by women and greater racial diversity, I am happy to fling my hat in the air. But that need not – indeed should not – mean an almost total severance with the past. When the National Theatre company was set up in the early 1960s, its literary manager, Ken Tynan, pointed out that there were only three plays in the West End written before the 1950s: “the kind of fantastic imbalance,” he wrote, “that the National Theatre exists to correct.” I would argue that still remains a vital part of the National’s brief.

What makes the issue even more urgent is that classic plays – again always excepting Shakespeare – are slowly but surely disappearing from the regional reps. It is not altogether their fault: the pincer movement of dwindling Arts Council subsidy and savage local government cuts means that it is increasingly difficult to stage large-cast plays.

Comb the regional theatre programmes for 2017 and you find sporadic nods to the classic rep: the Royal Exchange in Manchester offers Lorca, Aeschylus (by way of the Edinburgh Lyceum) and Shakespeare; the Crucible Sheffield programme includes Julius Caesar and O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms; Leeds’s West Yorkshire, Playhouse brings us Romeo and Juliet and Shaw’s Pygmalion. But, without wishing to lapse into woozy nostalgia, I think back fondly to the Birmingham Rep of my youth when, in a single season, I could see work by Shakespeare, Molière, Jonson and Farquhar along with four brand-new plays.

Does it matter? I think it does for a variety of reasons. A theatre that cuts itself off from its past is denying itself access to world masterpieces. Actors, designers and directors will eventually lose the ability to re-create the works of the past. We also see all around us the danger of living in a perpetual present: as Roger Cohen has pointed out in the New York Times, America currently boasts a president who seems to know nothing, and care less, about European or even American history. It may be a big leap from Donald Trump to drama’s rules but I would argue a healthy interaction between past and present has been a source of richness to the British theatre in my lifetime.

The question of the rise of director’s theatre is a slightly separate issue. The one thing I have learned is that there are few hard-and-fast rules. When classic plays are re-imagined with purpose and integrity – as with Ivo van Hove’s current Hedda Gabler or Rupert Goold’s Las Vegas-based Merchant of Venice – the results can be genuinely illuminating. When, however, classics are simply tricked out with modish adornments or used to display a director’s ego, the results can be equally dire.

Shakespeare, the argument runs, will always survive: other dramatists, however, are more susceptible to director’s whims.

Classic theatre is not quite dead yet. The RSC still maintains a lively dialogue between past and present. In London, off-West End theatres like the Orange Tree, the Finborough and the Arcola do an outstanding job in exploring the byways of world drama. But the National’s new programme offers a disturbing portent in that, in exploring its palpable duty to the living, it is denying us the chance to experience the illustrious dead.